On an official visit to West Germany in 1985, Canadian minister of defense Bob Coates visited a strip club. He left behind a briefcase containing sensitive documents. Uproar ensued. Coates soon resigned, the first of a lengthening series of ministers and MPs to depart the new Mulroney government under a cloud.

A young Stephen Harper worked during the Mulroney years as a parliamentary aide. He witnessed the Conservatives’ crushing election victory of 1984. Then he watched it all unravel. The 1984 landslide had brought into Parliament many people nobody had expected to arrive. A Conservative Party that had held power for only nine months of the previous 21 years had no idea how to manage this group of people once they got there. The result was fiascos, scandals and disasters that ended with the crack-up of the Conservative coalition and a dozen years of banishment to opposition.

Stephen Harper numbered among the dissidents who quit the Conservatives for a new Reform party. Reform promised more participation and more accountability. Reform party candidates proudly declared their beliefs on issues ranging from abortion to evolution to immigration. Alas, the new party soon found itself very nearly as bedeviled by embarrassments as Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives — and utterly incapable of setting an agenda or holding the initiative.

So it’s not really very surprising that when Stephen Harper emerged as leader of a reunited center-right, he saw it as one of his very first jobs to impose some discipline. “Why are you saying this?” was the question his team asked itself in regard to every word being communicated with the Canadian public. It seemed basic common sense to expect the party’s candidates to ask, and answer, the same question.

No party can win every vote or please every voter. But it can avoid offending people gratuitously. No party can perfectly protect itself against ever nominating crooked or stupid or obnoxious candidates. But it can screen against them and then take decisive action against those who somehow slip through the screens.

All that sounds easy. It’s not. Or rather, it’s not easy to do it

consistently: day in, day out through an election; year in, year out through the life of a government. In politics as in industry, quality control is a relentless struggle, in which one mistake can cancel 10,000 successes. If that was true for politicians before the advent of smartphones, YouTube, and Facebook, think how much more true it is today.
Sean Kilpatrick / the Canadian press

To pluck an example out of thin air: If a prime minister has pledged that his government won’t take action on abortion during its next mandate — and a backbencher insists on trying anyway — that action makes liars out of the whole government. Voters can’t be counted on to grasp the distinction between the “government” on the front benches and the government members behind them.

The votes of those backbenchers sustain the government. Stray musings by those backbenchers can doom it. A successful parliamentary leader is therefore likely to be a “control freak” for exactly the same reason that the manager of a nuclear reactor is likely to be: because the consequences of error can be so horrible. And Stephen Harper has been a very successful parliamentary leader.

Being a part of a control-freak government is not much fun. People run for office because they want to do things. Then they win — and suddenly, these new MPs hear only about the things they can’t do and mustn’t say. Understandably, they chafe.

The media chafe even more. The formal name for the Ottawa media is the Parliamentary Press Gallery, and that name is apt. Parliament is what they cover, and the thing that makes parliament worth covering is conflict. Conflict between parties is good. Conflict within parties is much better. The epic rivalry between Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien made a vastly better story than Jean Chrétien’s easy defeats of his election opponents. Divided parties are leaky parties, and leaky parties generate interesting news.

Which brings us to the “reform bill” advanced by dissident Conservative MP Michael Chong. This bill has attracted almost uniformly favorable attention, from the eminent Andrew Coyne first and foremost. Chong’s bill seeks to weaken the power of leaders over backbenchers. Leaders would lose their power to “fire” MPs by refusing to sign their nomination papers or expelling them from caucus. Only the caucus would be able to eject people from caucus. Disaffected backbenchers would gain new leverage over party leaders, because a small minority of them – 15% — could at any moment set in motion a leadership review.

The Reform Act is a grant of power to each party’s most irresponsible and refractory MPs. It’s an invitation to Parliamentarians to look even more inward than they already do. It purports to emancipate MPs. In reality, it will simply reorient them away from their national party leadership — which in turn is accountable to a broad national party membership — and toward activists in their constituencies.

In safer constituencies, it’s the nomination battle, not the election, that matters most. Nominations are decided by relatively small numbers of people who typically cluster more toward the political poles than the political center and have their own narrow agendas. Their influence is counteracted in Canada by the party leader’s ultimate veto power over nominations. That power is rarely used, but it shapes the whole process.

Advocates of the Reform Act promise that their concept will embolden MPs to speak for the interests of their constituencies rather than follow some dictated party line. Much more likely, however, is that the Reform Act will narrow MPs’ accountability; and the safer the seat, the more the accountability will be narrowed.

Seemingly small changes in political rules can yield very large changes in political result. Given Canada’s record as arguably the best governed country in the developed world, you’d want to be very cautious about tinkering with those rules.

It’s not regional interests that will get more airing, but factional interests

Advocates of the Reform Act, however, deny that Canada is so well governed. They see a Parliament crushed and stifled; MPs deprived of their historic role; local constituencies trampled by an all-powerful Prime Minister’s Office.

It’s a very odd perspective that sees the PMO as a more powerful restraint on democracy than, say, Canada’s highly activist and utterly unaccountable courts. But leave that aside and ask: Who will benefit from Michael Chong’s proposed charter for greater MP independence? The promise is that, freed from PMO control, MPs will speak out on behalf of the good people of his or her constituency with a verve and brio sadly lacking today. But where’s the evidence that such local interests go unarticulated today? I’ve seen none adduced. It’s not regional interests that will get more airing, but factional interests.

The empowering of factionalism poses special dangers to Canada’s center-right, the grouping historically most vulnerable to internecine squabbles. The governments of John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney ended not in mere defeat, but in party civil wars that banished conservatives from office for a political generation. Stephen Harper has avoided that fate, and he’s avoided it not — as his critics say — by crushing opposition, but rather by inching his way down the path of the possible. It may be dull to watch. But more exciting politics is not the same thing as better government.

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